Localisation Tools @ Wikimedia
As part of my role at Wikimedia Foundation, I shall be posting about things related to localisation / internationalisation efforts at Wikimedia Foundation Localization team and things generally related to Wikipedia / i18n.
For those who are unaware of the way it works, here is a short intro.
- Wikimedia projects exist in 280+ langauges.
- The software Mediawiki is localized at translatewiki.net which itself is a wiki powered by Translate extension
- Similar to the large army of volunteers who contribute content to Wiki projects, there is also a small army (~5000+) of volunteer translators in all these 280+ languages.
The localisation team develops / maintains extensions / additional piece of software which help users of these language versions of the Wikimedia projects read / contribute to them by providing tools which assist them.
- Extension:WebFonts delivers fonts from the server through the browser to viewers and does not mandate user’s system should have the fonts installed to view the pages.
- Extension:Narayam provides an input method solution for languages which do not have their own physical keyboards (primarily used for non latin scripts).
- Extension:LocalisationUpdate, Extension:CLDR, Extension:TranslationNotifications, Extension:Babel are some of the other behind the scenes infrastructure which assist localisation.
- Fixing bugs to support complex scripts / Right to left languages in the all of wikimedia software
- Universal_Language_Selector - a new tool which assists users in switching interface language and use language tools is currently being built.
I will keep posting more about these in detail in the days to come.
